RE-INHABITING THE ISLANDS - The University of North Carolina at ...

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family roots in Texas and Washington as sources of place-knowledge to reveal how the
New World landmass is an ancient island. This is a heuristic to recover an ancient
balance between national membership and natural membership, hinted at by the ancient
Indo-European ―root nat‖ common to ―nation, natal and native‖ (Snyder ―Ecology,
Literature and the New World Disorder‖ 4). Raymond Williams demonstrates that unqualified
pastoral desire is false consciousness by tracing English longing for ―a way of
country life‖ back through an ―escalator‖ of repeated references to a previous era,
ultimately arriving in the ―well-remembered garden‖ of Eden (Country and the City 9-
12). The ancestral Turtle Island and Omeros can be mistakenly read as a problematic
form of pastoral memory, which harks back to an Eden separated from the remembering
subject‘s inherited place by an ocean of space and time. Turtle Island and Omeros mend
this problematic by articulating the desire to uncover natural belonging in the present. In
these books, the scarred landscape becomes a tough, but sustaining source of presence
and vitality. For example, in Snyder‘s ―Above Pate Valley‖ set in Yosemite National
Park, the narrator rests during lunch after clearing trails (Riprap and Cold Mountain
Poems 11). During the summers of 1951 and 1954, Snyder worked for the logging
industry in Oregon and Washington as a timber scaler and log setter (Gray 68). The
speaker of the poem rests in a ―green meadow watered by the snow‖ and eats ―cold fried
trout in the / trembling shadows.‖ Spotting a glittering obsidian arrowhead, he gets on his
―hand and knees / pushing the Bear grass.‖ Although he looks keenly at the ―thousands /
of arrowhead leavings over a / hundred yards,‖ there is ―not one good / Head, just razor
flakes.‖ 49 The pastoral memory of the poem‘s speaker is realistic. The poet searches
49 According to Mark David Spence, the last Yosemite Indian to live in the national park,